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China instability rising with fungible rule of law

The government is increasingly consumed with controlling a fast-changing society. | Reuters

Earlier this month, in fact, labor rights activist Li Wangyang was found hanging from a sheet tied to the prison bars of his hospital room window. Government officials called the death a suicide. The problem was, Li had just been released from more than 20 years in prison. He’d been perfectly healthy when first jailed, but repeated torture had left him blind and nearly deaf, prompting the widely asked question: How could he have managed to find the sheet, fashion a noose and choose a place to tie it?

Li was just the latest in a long string of suspicious deaths. Last August, Xie Yexin, a Hubei Province official who’d made a name for himself as an anti-corruption campaigner, was found dead in his office — stabbed 11 times in his chest, neck and abdomen. The knife lay next to his body, its handle wrapped in tissue paper. Government authorities called that a suicide, too.

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“It’s not a criminal case, and we have no obligation to investigate,” said Wang Jianping, a local police official.

Earlier, Qian Yunhui, a former village chief in Zhejiang province, was run over by a heavy truck and killed a few hundred yards from his home. He’d been speaking out about illegal government land seizures. China Business News quoted villagers saying they’d seen the victim “being carried by four uniformed security guards and [being] thrown in front of the heavy truck.” But the government called it “a simple traffic accident.”

When villagers protested that explanation, authorities immediately deployed more than 1,000 police with shields and electric batons, the South China Morning Post reported. The security camera overlooking the highway, they explained, “was malfunctioning.” Then, they seized Qian’s body and took his family away, too. The central government blocked his name from Internet search engines and social media sites.

These are not isolated cases. Communist party officers who stray from doctrine are routinely thrown into detention, and over the past decade, state media have reported that hundreds of them have committed suicide.

Bo Xilai, the deposed Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, is believed to be in one of those detention centers now. He was also apparently planning to kill his accuser, Wang Lijun, the provincial police chief. Wang had accused Bo’s wife of killing Heywood and taking refuge in the American consulate. Heywood had been transferring the family’s billions in cash holdings out of the country, as so many wealthy Chinese do.

Hong Kong’s New Way magazine reported that Bo wanted to call Wang’s death a suicide caused by depression or remorse. But events transpired so fast that Bo was never able to carry out his purported plot. Instead, Wang is now in detention, too, where he is “accepting vacation-style treatment,” the Chongqing government said. That prompted thousands of mocking rejoinders on social media sites.

Chen Honggang, Chongqing’s traffic police chief, was not so fortunate. He is said to have killed himself in detention by smashing his head against a wall.

"All of that is part of the larger problem, Kamm added: “the lack of rule of law, the lack of transparency,” the government “acting against its own laws.”

Doesn't this sound like the present US Adminstration? The lack of rule of law(forced Departmental Regulations), the lack of transparency(Fast and Furious),” the government “acting against its own laws(immigration pick the ones you like that have been ignored).

for years we've been hearing about how China's growth is going to make them a new #1. That can't happen until their corruption and freedom crushing issues are dealt with... China is not a threat to the USA, not as long as they treat their people worse than dogs.